TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION L. 601 
exercised and continually developed in doing this—it is in these that culture 
essentially lies.’ And if this is what culture really means, evidently it cannot be 
regarded as something superfine—as an intellectual luxury suited only for people 
who can lead lives of elegant leisure. Education consists in organising the 
resources of the human being; it seeks to give him powers which shall fit him for 
his social and physical world. One mark of an uneducated person is that he is 
embarrassed by any situation to which he is not accustomed. The educated person 
is able to deal with circumstances in which he has never been placed before ; he is 
so, because he has acquired general conceptions; his imagination, his-judgment, 
his powers of intelligent sympathy have been developed. The mental culture 
which includes such attributes is of inestimable value in the practical work of life, 
and especially in work of a pioneer kind. It is precisely in a country which pre- 
sents new problems, where novel difficulties of all sorts have to be faced, where 
social and political questions assume complex forms for which experience furnishes 
no exact parallels, it is precisely there that the largest and best gifts which the 
higher education can confer are most urgently demanded. 
But how is culture, as distinct from mere knowledge, to be attained? The 
question arises as soon as we turn from the machinery of the higher education to 
consider its essence and the general aims which it has in view. Culture cannot 
be secured by planning courses of study, nor can it be adequately tested by the most 
ingenious system of examinations. But it would be generally allowed that a 
University training, if it is really successful, ought to result in giving culture, over 
and above such knowledge as the student may acquire in his particular branch or 
branches of study. We all know what Matthew Arnold did, a generation ago, to 
interpret and diffuse in England his conception of culture. The charm, the 
humour, and also the earnestness of the essays in which he pleaded that cause 
render them permanently attractive in themselves, while at the same time they 
have the historical interest of marking a phase in the progress of Jinglish thought 
and feeling about education. For, indeed, whatever may be the criticisms to 
which Arnold's treatment of the subject is open in detail, he truly indicated a 
great national defect ; and by leading a multitude of educated persons to realise it, 
he helped to prepare the way for better things. Dealing with England as it was 
in the sixties, he complained that the bulk of the well-to-do classes were devoid 
of mental culture—crude in their perceptions, insensible to beauty, and com- 
placently impenetrable to ideas. If, during the last thirty or forty years, there 
has been a marked improvement, the popular influence of Matthew Arncld’s 
writings may fairly be numbered among the contributory causes, though other 
and much more potent causes have also been at work. When we examine 
Arnold’s own conception of culture, as expressed in successive essays, we find that 
it goes through a process of evolution. At first he means by ‘culture’ a knowledge 
and love of the best literature, ancient and modern, and the influence on mind 
and manners which flows thence. Then his conception of culture becomes enlarged ; 
it is now no longer solely or mainly esthetic, but also intellectual ; it includes 
receptivity of new ideas; it is even the passion for ‘ seeing things as they really 
are. But there is yet a further development. True culture, in his final view, is 
not only esthetic and intellectual; it is also moral and spiritual; its aim is, in 
his phrase, ‘the harmonious expansion of all the powers which make the beauty 
and worth of human nature.’ But whether the scope which Arnold, at a 
particular moment, assigned to culture was narrower or wider, the instrument of 
culture with which he was chiefly concerned was always literature. Culture 
requires us, he said, to know ourselves and the world; and, as a means to this 
end, we must ‘ know the best that has been thought and said in the world.’ By 
literature, then—as he once said in reply to Huxley—he did not mean merely 
belles lettres; he included the books which record the great results of science. 
But he insisted mainly on the best poetry and the highest eloquence. In com- 
paring science and literature as general instruments of education, Arnold observed 
that the power of intellect and knowledge is not the only one that goes to the 
building-up of human life; there is also the power of conduct and the power of 
beauty. Literature, be said, serves to bring knowledge into relation with our 
